Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(70)

Two of the first to arrive were cultural anthropologists Robert and Shirley Glasse (now Shirley Lindenbaum), who came from Australia to New Guinea on a university grant in 1961. Studying kinship among the Fore, they returned to continue their research in 1962 and 1963. Their work in the New Guinea Highlands would ultimately allow them to make the connection between kuru and cannibalism.

I met Dr. Shirley Lindenbaum half a century later at an Upper West Side apartment, which had been decorated with art and other memorabilia collected during a long and distinguished career. In a voice that still retained the hint of an Australian accent, she talked about her studies.

“What was it that finally convinced you that cannibalism was the mode of kuru transmission?” I asked her.

Lindenbaum explained that once the epidemic began in the New Guinea Highlands, she and her husband were instructed to gather genealogical data about people who had kuru. In doing so, they spoke to Fore elders who had seen the first cases of the disease in their villages.

“They could remember these cases and even the names of the people in the North Fore who came down with the disease some couple of decades earlier. There were these tremendously convincing first stories and we said, ‘What happened to those people?’ And the Fore said, ‘Well, they were consumed.’ We knew they were cannibals.”

I pressed on, asking Lindenbaum how she knew for sure that the Fore were cannibals. Without hesitation, she cited “fieldwork in the area by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in the 1950s” as well as “government patrol reports throughout the Eastern Highlands.”

I may or may not have raised an eyebrow at the mention of the Berndts but I did ask Lindenbaum if she was bothered by the fact that no anthropologist, including the Berndts, had ever seen ritualized cannibalism firsthand.

“No,” Lindenbaum replied. “Because there are a lot of things we haven’t seen firsthand—sexual intercourse among them. But there’s evidence that it occurs.”

At this point, something like an alarm went off in my brain. Basically, this line about sexual intercourse has become something of a mantra for those anthropologists who claim that ritual cannibalism occurred in a particular group, even though they had not seen it with their own eyes.

After encountering this undeniably catchy analogy several times in the literature, I became curious as to its origin. As far as I can tell, it was coined by Pulitzer Prize–winning anthropologist Jared Diamond, in an article he wrote for Nature in 2000.48 Here’s the relevant passage:

Finally, any society has practices considered acceptable in private but inappropriate to practice in public, in the presence either of anyone else (for example, sex or defecation) or of non-clan members (for example, initiation rites or cannibalism). The abundance of New Guinea babies, my knowledge that babies are conceived by sexual intercourse, and secondhand accounts persuade me that New Guineans practice sex, but I have no firsthand observations of it even after many years there.

The reason for my unease at the mention of this particular notion was based on my interview with Bill Arens, who eventually acknowledged a “clear-cut association” between cannibalism and kuru. Still, though, he had a major problem with the cannibalism/sexual intercourse comparison. Approximately two seconds after asking Arens what he thought about Diamond’s famous line, he answered my question with one of his own.

“You ever been in the field with an anthropologist?”

I admitted that I hadn’t.

“They’re always screwing the natives! So they know sexual intercourse takes place.”

“O . . . kay.” I said, scanning the paper I had been holding for another question, something about Arens’s favorite ice cream flavor, perhaps.

The anthropologist smiled at what I thought was some well-camouflaged discomfort on my part. “Well, I’m just telling you,” he said. “You gave me the example. And it’s absurd. No anthropologists should ever say that we don’t know sexual intercourse takes place among those people because we’ve never seen it, because that’s really a falsehood. They’ve seen it. And I know they’ve seen it. And if they haven’t seen it . . . they should get a mirror!”

Months later on the Upper West Side, Lindenbaum was completely unaware of my unease with what had obviously become a standard line among anthropologists studying aspects of behavior that were, for whatever reason, hard to observe. She continued with her story.

“We knew cannibalism was customary in this area but that the disease had only appeared in the last few decades. And so we thought, Well, that’s very interesting. When we began collecting ethnographic data about who ate whom, it became clear that it was adult women, not adult men, but children of both sexes. At that time the director of kuru research in New Guinea was a guy named Richard Hornabrook, a neurologist. And he said to us, ‘What is it that adult women and children do that adult men don’t do?’ and we said, ‘Cannibalism, of course.’ The epidemiological evidence matched the cultural/behavior evidence, and that matched the historical origin evidence. It was such a neat package, you know?”

I nodded. “So what did you do with that information?”

“We told everybody,” she said.

“And?”

“And nobody believed us.”

Nevertheless, Robert Glasse published his and his then-wife, Shirley’s, hypothesis that kuru was transmitted by consuming the body parts of relatives who had died from the disease. As support, he cited the fact that women commonly participated in ritual cannibal feasts but not men. He also wrote that children of both sexes had become infected because they accompanied their mothers to these ceremonies and participated in the consumption of contaminated tissue, including brains. Finally, Glasse calculated that kuru appeared anywhere between four and 24 years after the ingestion of cooked human tissue containing an unidentified pathogenic agent.49